"There Goes the Top of My Head" - a paraphrase of Emily Dickinson’s criteria for recognizing a true poem. Although I've left older posts here about all sorts of topic, for the foreseeable future, this will be my repository for anything literary: book reviews / reactions, writing journal, and any topics related to editing or writing poetry or fiction.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Friday Spontaneous Poem

This week’s prompt comes from my friend Todd. (Apologetic note: Jean and Linda, please be patient. I’m sorry it’s been taking me awhile to get to your requests. I hope to attend to them this weekend. Todd’s request came earlier and was misplaced.)

I suppose Todd thought I was ignoring his request, thus the challenging tone of the re-request I got:

If you're not up to the challenge of incorporating:

(( greased pole climb ))

(( town square ))

(( courthouse clock ))

(( sunburn ))

...then I'll wrap that one up myself, since it's drawn from a pretty specific summer memory of mine when I was about ten years old. Your call; let me know either way.

Well, Todd. I’d sure like to see you write this poem also. But here’s my crack at it, buddy! And thanks for the positive feedback and encouragement too!

One last note: If you ever have difficulty reading the scans of these poems, you can enlarge the view by clicking on the poem. If that doesn't help enough, drop me a line. I'll fix the problem somehow.

1 comment:

Wow -- I'm digging this one more and more as I go back and re-read it. You've taken some of my oddball keywords and made them your own; my hat's off to you, Maestro! Another piece of brilliance freely given to the masses...

About Me

Keith Badowski studied English Lit at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His love for poetry emerged during work on an undergrad degree in English at SUNY New Paltz. He currently serves as a minister at Epworth United Methodist Church in Phenix City, AL. In 2009, he began a stint as President of the Georgia Poetry Society and co-founded Brick Road Poetry Press (with Ron Self). As of July 2016, he has turned his writing efforts to fiction and is fumbling through the process of writing a novel. He dearly loves his wife, Christina, and thoroughly enjoys reading novels to her in the car while she drives.